EDWARD JENNER 1749-1823

Edward Jenner was an English physician, the discoverer of vaccination. He was born at Berkley, Gloucestershire, on May 17, 1749. Jenner studied medicine in London at St George’s Hospital. He began practice in Berkeley in 1773 when he was 24 years old.

Edward Jenner liked to observe and inves­tigate things ever since he was a boy. This led to the discovery of vaccination against smallpox. Today cases of smallpox are very rare because almost every baby in the world is vaccinated against this disease.

Edward Jenner was a country boy. He lived in a quiet village that he loved. Nature Study was Jenner’s favourite pastime. He loved and understood country life. When John Hunter*, the famous naturalist, asked him to study the habits of the cuckoo, Jenner, after hours of patient watching, discovered what really happened.

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*Hunter, John (1728-1793) — British anatomist and surgeon.

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In April when the cuckoo arrives in Brit­ain, she looks for other birds preparing their nests. She remains nearby and as soon as the little bird has laid its eggs and has left the nest, the cuckoo slips into it, lays, her own large eggs, and flies off.

When the new-born cuckoo is two or three days old, it throws the little birds over the edge of the nest with one of its wings. That is why only the cuckoo survives. Natural­ists of our time, by taking photographs of the young cuckoos, have proved that Jen­ner was right.

In 1751, George Washington* caught small­pox.

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*Washington, George (1732-1799) — the first president of the United States of America.

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As a result his face was pittied with smallpox sears. In Washington’s days, the whole world feared smallpox. One out of every five persons in London carried the marks of the disease on his face. It was the same in the other cities of Europe. But these were the people who recovered from the disease. In the 18th century, smallpox was one of the chief causes of death. Young and old were attacked. Children of poor parents died before they were five years old; of all the diseases smallpox was the worst. The disease had been common for centuries in China, India and Turkey. The Turks had discovered that a person could escape a serious attack of smallpox by being infected with a mild form of the disease. In India the children were wrapped in the clothes of a smallpox patient to give them a mild attack. Many people felt that it was better to catch the disease during a mild epidemic than to take a chance during a severe epidemic later.

Edward Jenner was a man who was always, trying to gain knowledge wherever he could. Nothing ever escaped his sight and hearing. Years before he had heard a milkmaid say she couldn’t catch that disease. She had had a cowpox. That moment was to be decisive in Jenner’s life. It led to the control of smallpox. At first he spoke about the milkmaid’s words with Dr Ludlow, whose apprentice he was. Dr Ludlow laughed, calling milkmaids “poor ignorant girls” because they believed that cowpox, a mild animal disease, would protect them against smallpox.

Young Jenner asked himself many times if the harmless cowpox would give immunity to smallpox. Later on, in London, Jenner put the question to John Hunter. Most Lon­don doctors would have laughed at the ques­tions, but Hunter advised Jenner to try and be patient.

So Jenner continued to think. He had end­less conversations about cowpox. His friends laughed at him. But Jenner did not give up.

One day he came to conclusion that there was one type of cowpox that would give protection against smallpox. It took him nearly five years to find the answer. He made a study of all diary diseases and found a lot of them. All were called cowpox. But Jenner believed that only one kind was the preventative against smallpox he divided the diary diseases into “true” cowpox and “false” cowpox. Between the long hours night and day, which he devoted to his patients, he began a new study of hundreds of cows and milkers.

On May 14, 1796, a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, came to see Edward Jenner, now a qual­ified doctor with 20 years’ experience. The woman had cowpox. Jenner pressed out a lit­tle poisonous matter from the woman’s sore. Then he gave her a sleeping-powder and sent her home. After that he asked his appren­tice to send a message to Mrs Philips, her neighbour, and asked her to bring her little son Jimmy with her. He explained to the woman that expected to save Jimmy from catching smallpox by giving a person cowpox. The woman agreed. Jenner took the boy on his knee, and making a small cut with his knife, he rubbed some cowpox matter into his arm. So was accomplished one of the most important events in the history of medicine. Jenner vaccinated Jimmy Philips with mat­ter from cowpox vesicles squeezed from the hands of a milkmaid.

Each day Edward Jenner visited Jimmy Philips. Then came the worst. Several weeks later Jenner inoculated the boy with small­pox matter. The next few days were the most exciting of Jenner’s life. But the time passed, and the boy remained absolutely free from the disease.

Jenner repeated his experiment during the next two years. His chief difficulties were to find cases of cowpox to provide him with lymph and to discover people willing to have the little operation. After repeating his ex­periments 23 times, he felt certain enough of the truth of his discovery to publish his results and make it know to other doctors. Jenner’s discovery of vaccination was one of the great discoveries in the history of medicine.

In 1798, he published an account calling his new method “vaccination”, from Latin word vacca, meaning a cow.

At first people paid no attention to the work of the country doctor. One doctor even said that vaccination might cause people to get cows’ faces. But soon doctors began to be­lieve in vaccination. In Oxfordshire 326 people were vaccinated. Later 173 were in­fected with the smallpox germ, and not one of them caught the disease.

Soon the news of the wonderful discovery spread abroad. People rushed to their doc­tors to be vaccinated. Very soon there was no part of the world that had not taken up vaccination. France, Germany, Spain and Austria were the first. In America, Egypt, China, the operation was done on thousands of people and the terrible smallpox began to disappear as if by magic.

In 1803, the Spanish government sent an ex­pedition to its colonies in South America to put an end to smallpox there. The expedition then moved to China. The Indians were so grateful to Jenner that they sent him a gift of over 5,000 pounds.

For many years the day of which little Jim­my had been vaccinated was kept as festi­val in Berlin. Before, in Germany, small­pox had killed about 30,000 people a year. The French Emperor, Napoleon*, although he was at war with England, released two British prisoners when he learned that they were friends of Edward Jenner.

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*Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) — the emperor of France from 1804 to 1815.

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Honours and gifts from all over the world came to Jenner. It gave him great happiness to read the statistics. In Havana, for example, there had been a single death from smallpox in a two-year period. And Havana had once had the highest smallpox death rate in the world. In Milan, no deaths; in Vienna, no deaths; in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, no deaths.

Edward Jenner died at Berkeley in 1823, aged 74. To his latest days the “country doctor” lived simply, spending on research the money, which Parliament granted him, and vaccinating free of charge anyone who came to him.

Jenner brought into common use the doc­trine of preventive medicine. He laid the groundwork for the science of immunology. Three-quarters of a century later, the French chemist Louis Pasteur*, drawing on Jenner’s work, set the course for the sci­ence of immunology and the discovery of modern preventive medicine.

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*Pasteur, Louis (1822-1895) — a French scientist known for his studies of fermentation and bacteria; inventor of the proc­ess of pasteurization.